Can social connection spark humanitarian movements?
Our Social Change Manager, Christian Stenta, shares what his team has been up to in the social change and connection space.
Social connection is a powerful tool in our response to vulnerability.
It helps to strengthen social cohesion, a key element in fostering communities that are inclusive and welcoming of migrants and refugees.
It’s a key indicator of a community’s resilience to bounce back from adversity, such as floods or bushfires.
It’s a core driver of Red Cross membership — both being connected to like-minded people living out their humanitarian values, but also being connected to community, as a community.
For First Nations peoples, ‘Connection to Country’ describes their deep, enduring and sacred relationship not only with their land but across all aspects of existence — culture, spirituality, language, law, family and identity.
Our innovative work on healthy social connection with Professor Jane Farmer and our partners at Swinburne Social Innovation Research Institute has not only demonstrated the dynamic nature of connection, but helped us to imagine its enormous potential when we start to think about it as an investment in social infrastructure — something we can activate and tap into, in response to vulnerability.
Connection plays a central role in mobilising people, business and communities. Alongside action, connection itself is a powerful prosocial behaviour — that is, behaviour intended to help others. As we face unprecedented levels of vulnerability and inequity, we can only genuinely respond by bringing these groups together and nurturing humanitarian movements grounded in action and connection.
The social and environmental changes needed to address humanitarian need at scale cannot be achieved by any one individual, brand, organisation, industry or network — it can only be solved by bringing diverse groups together to achieve a common goal. This requires fundamental shifts in our interactions and relationships; changes that over time can transform our cultural and social institutions, and result in positive and long lasting consequences for society.
Swinburne’s research into everyday humanitarianism shows us that the community is already on this path. Black Summer and the COVID-19 pandemic are just two recent examples which highlight the ways in which people and communities are mobilising their knowledge, skills and resources quickly in response to hyper-local needs. Both of these examples demonstrate the way people are connecting and taking action through peer networks, online platforms and in their own local communities, with organisations like Red Cross increasingly working to connect these efforts at a broader scale, amplifying patterns and measuring systems-level impact. It’s what we call ‘being a platform’.
We’re building our knowledge and capacity to work with the community in this new way. In addition to nurturing communities like REDx Youth and Digital Advocates, we’re testing tools to spark connection and action on issues like nuclear disarmament, and investing in emerging leaders through REDxYouth Activators. We’ve also been working with Australian Red Cross’ national Justice team to explore how we can grow a movement of businesses who are taking action to create more supportive and inclusive workplaces for those returning to the community.
We’re also establishing new collaborative social change partnerships. We’re working with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society to explore ways we can use social data to identify and unlock the latent potential for humanitarian action and connection that exists in community. We’ve also recently submitted an Australian Research Council linkage grant proposal to take forward and further test our healthy social connection model with Swinburne and a diverse range of community partners.
Case study: Rideshare Radio
2.5 million Australians have embraced independent, short-term work in the Gig Economy in the hope of freedom and autonomy. However, the reality can be very different. Research suggests Gig Economy workers feel let down by the system, and experience a lack of control in what they can do and how much they can make. Workers are increasingly finding themselves in isolation, working across multiple platforms and constantly chasing the next ‘gig’.
With more than half of us already unsatisfied with our increasingly loose social connections, will the rise in remote working also give rise to a deeper, more insidious loneliness epidemic? The REDx team collaborated with behaviour change communications experts The Shannon Company to try solve this problem. Our social change practice identified key life transitions, like starting a new job, as an opportunity for intervention. It’s a time where many of us experience some level of loneliness, as we say goodbye to our old work friends and start building connections with new ones. We saw an opportunity to anticipate and disrupt these acute experiences so that they don’t become chronic.
In recognition of the challenges in engaging with remote workers, we decided to focus on rideshare drivers and use a podcast as our engagement channel. We put the call out, and invited eight drivers from around the country to share their tips and stories with our podcast host, journalist and comedian Sami Shah. We wanted to know whether being a rideshare driver was as isolating as the research suggested, and how we could solve the problem. What we found was that these drivers were actually super-connectors — sparking and nurturing connection across their rideshare communities.
This got us thinking — if we stopped trying to fix the problem ourselves, and focused on how we could nurture the super-connector capacity of Rideshare drivers as a form of humanitarian action — imagine the potential reach! That’s what being a platform is all about — harnessing the latent power of people and business to be a force for social change, and amplifying their impact.
You can listen to our Rideshare Radio podcast on Soundcloud, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
